Do Not Despair! I moved to north MS from south of N.O. The soil here is hard clay. But.....it has many good qualities such as holds water, has nutrients. Here are the main things you can do. Do not try to dig when it is hard. I have *literally* used a pickaxe and even that didn't work and you can really hurt yourself e.g. your shoulder. Either you work the soil after a rain, the soil should be like moist chocolate cake, crumbly and moist but not sticking together like pottery clay. If it is just a light rain you prob. can dig, but if a heavy rain might have to wait a couple days. Or...you can water the ground with a sprinkler, mimicking a rain, and see how workable the soil gets. You must mulch with a thick organic mulch like pine straw, straw, shredded bark, compost. This WILL HELP the soil over time. I do agree that raised beds allow you to plant immediately I do use the lasagna method which is to lay thick wet newspaper sheets down over the area you want to make a garden, then pile on compost or good soil, or just organic matter like shredded leaves and grass clippings. Some folks say you can plant directly in the organic matter, others wait a season for it to all decompose, like make your raised bed in fall with leaves etc and it will be ready to work in spring. Hope this helps. I was very desperate and depressed when I moved (Katrina) had no gardens here but I mulch and I compost and in a couple years it was remarkably better. One more thing, when you plant dig a very wide hole like 3x the rootball or even 4x but no deeper than the rootball. Backfill with the native clay soil with some compost mixed in there too. Spread the roots and MULCH.

Bon, I did find that a little odd too, but the temperature range from No. 1 to No. 10 isn't all that big. I think we had cooler weather in Jan-Feb 2011 and that kept down the average temperature. It bothers me that 2 of those top ten years were the last two years. That's not a trend we want to see continue. Our winter weather is southern OK likely was very similar to OKC's in both 2011 and 2012. I don't remember the last time we were as warm in January and February as we were in 2012. We often have scattered warm to hot days in those months--but only a couple of them scattered randomly in one or two of those months in any given year. This year we were just flat hot for far too much of the winter. The upside to a warm winter is that often the last freeze is very early and we get an early start on planting. I think the early warm weather and lack of recurring cold nights and 'late' freezes has played a huge role in the great tomato harvests this year. This is the kind of weather we had prior to 2005. Since 2005, it has stayed cold at night later and made it harder to get an early start with tomatoes. I'd love to see the early last freeze be a trend that continues forever. Dawn

Be sure to cross-post in the Cooking forum! Here is a link that might be useful: cooking forum

I'm one of those people who can't be ready in 10 minutes, no way and I'm not even high maintenance. It's my hair that is time consuming. Takes me more than 10 minutes just to dry my hair. My hair is only shoulder length but it is very thick and coarse. I cannot let it air dry b/c of its texture...it just gets really frizzy if I do that. I have to dry it completely, which takes more than 10 minutes, then depending on how straight I'm able to dry it, sometimes I also use a flat iron on it. I don't wear a lot of makeup so that part doesn't take long. I honestly can't imagine being able to shower, dress, do hair and make up in 10 minutes. Showering alone (shaving, washing hair/face/body) takes more than 5 minutes. As far as being a busy mother with no time to shower, yes, I do mean that. However, if I know I'm going somewhere out in public where I'm going to see people, I will drop something in order to shower/be presentable. But there have been times when I've gone to the gym, run an errand on the way home, then come home and spent the day cleaning, doing laundry, prepping dinner for that night, etc and along the way purposely decided NOT to shower (why, if I know I'm cleaning bathrooms,etc all day) yet still run into school to pick my 8 y/o from an after school activity. While I generally *dont* like to run into school looking like that, still in my gym clothes, I'm not going to waste that time showering simply b/c I'm going to see people when I run into school for five minutes. Knowing I can use that 30 minutes to finish another load of laundry, which, with four kids is never-ending, is more important to me than my friends/acquaintances seeing me looking not 100% put together. However, I don't make a habit of doing that. I prefer to look more presentable but sometimes it doesn't necessarily make sense. I run regularly with several women in the mornings after we drop our kids at school. One of the women is one I didn't know before being introduced to her by a friend in common when she showed up to run with us. Our kids were at the same school, but I'd never met her. I only ever saw her for months in the morning for our runs, in running clothes and hair pulled back in a tight ponytail. Much later in the year, at an evening school event, I heard someone yell my name and when I looked over, this beautiful woman was waving at me. It took me a moment to recognize her...she looked so completely different with her hair down and styled, make up and nice clothes on. I couldn't believe it was the same woman! She never looked bad w/o makeup, etc, but the difference when she actually put herself together was amazing. Alas, I'm not one of those women who can completely change her appearance with a bit of makeup!